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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Newsweek: The Hunt for Child Sex Abusers Is Happening in the Wrong Places By Abigail Jones

First the title
on the Newsweek cover is extremely misleading, but the article title is correct. The majority of the article seems to be a PR promotion for Lauren Book, who I have previously posted about as well as her father Ron Book..... they both personally profit from the civil commitment of SVP’s and the privatization of prisons/commitment facilities......then there is the Julia Tuttle Bridge/Causeway Homeless RSO mess
that was /is ALL Ron Books doing...….but........ after reading this article twice I decided it had
some facts, points and experts input that are totally worth sharing.........so here it is.

Mary
Devoy

The Hunt for Child Sex Abusers Is
Happening in the Wrong Places, June 23, 2015

It’s late
March when Lauren Book and I head into the bowels of the Florida Civil
Commitment Center (FCCC), armed with loose-leaf paper, pencils and the
knowledge that we are about to sit face to face with three of the most
dangerous sexually violent predators in the state. “This is the most
manipulative crowd on the planet,” says Kristin Kanner, director of the Florida
Department of Children and Families’ Sexually Violent Predator Program. And one
of the men we’re seeing today has been sending Book and her father angry
letters for the past few years.

The FCCC
is surrounded by seemingly endless stretches of sugar fields, cow pastures and
orange groves. Wrapped in 12-foot barbed wire fences and guarded with more than
200 cameras, it is where Florida
keeps 640 of its worst sexually violent offenders. About half have committed
crimes against just children, a third against just adults.

Visits
like ours are rare. Aside from prosecutors, defense attorneys and legislators,
the last time anyone from the general public was granted this kind of FCCC
access was in 2013, Book’s first visit. Her father, Ron Book, routinely
referred to as one of the most powerful lobbyists in Florida, was not happy about that trip. “I
just don’t like exposing her to the population,” he explains. “These are people
one step away from killing a kid. People who stole children’s childhoods.”

Lauren Book, who’s 30, is one of over 42
million adult survivors of child sexual abuse in the U.S. For six years, starting when
she was 11, her family’s live-in nanny sexually abused her. Today, she teaches
children, parents and educators about child sexual abuse and prevention through
her nonprofit, Lauren’s Kids. “There was a prevailing thought that child sexual abuse only happened in those neighborhoods over there, with those kids, not in our private school,
in our gated community,” says Book, who grew up in a wealthy part of South
Florida. “It was important to say, ‘Yes, it does happen to blond-haired,
green-eyed kids who go to the university school.’”

When we
walk into the FCCC’s main entrance, the first thing we see is a large poster
announcing a sexual-abuse awareness fundraiser among residents and staff. Book,
Claire VanSusteren (communications director of Lauren’s Kids) and I had already
agreed to background checks, so all that was left to do was present our IDs to
the guard and hand over our personal belongings. We walk through a metal
detector and into an interior hallway, where a reassuringly large security
guard leads us to the visiting room. “Do you stay for the interviews?” I ask,
hoping his answer is yes. He nods.

The room
is large and sterile, with white tables, blue chairs and vending machines
pushed up against one wall. Defense attorney Jeanine Cohen; Brian Mason, a
lawyer with the FCCC; and the security guard sit nearby, but it’s clear that
Book, VanSusteren and I will be the ones sharing a table with each of the sex
offenders. I immediately flash to a piece of advice an expert gave me: “Odds
are, in a facility you’ll be safe. But don’t let [the sex offenders] sit
between you and the door.” He added, as if reading my mind, “It’s right out of
the movie—Hannibal Lecter!”

In Florida, it’s legal to
lock up sex offenders after they’ve served their sentences, as long as they’ve
been deemed too dangerous to rejoin society. The process, called civil
commitment, has existed here since 1999, when the Jimmy Ryce Act took effect in
honor of a 9-year-old boy who was abducted on his way home from school, then
raped, decapitated and dismembered. When sex offenders complete their time in
prison, Florida’s Sexually Violent Predator Program reviews their cases,
looking for evidence of “a mental abnormality or personality disorder—something
that makes them likely to reoffend,” Kanner says.

Once
civilly committed, residents spend six to seven years, sometimes longer,
undergoing extensive treatment, and they need to show rehabilitation before
they are considered for release. While it’s unlikely someone would be let out
without participating in treatment, special situations do occur—as when a
resident is “severely medically compromised,” Kanner says, or “‘ages’ out of
the risk to reoffend.” For some residents, refusing treatment means spending
the rest of their lives inside those 12-foot barbed wire fences.

Today,
civil commitment is legal in 20 states and under federal law, and it’s deeply
controversial. “If you ask any psychologist involved in [civil commitment],
they’ll tell you that treatment is the only thing we know that will change
someone,” says Kanner. Since 1998, 932 sex offenders have been civilly
committed at the FCCC, and on average, 85 percent of them opt for treatment.
“Research shows that sex offenders who receive specialized treatment services
reoffend at lower rates than those who don’t get treatment,” says Jill
Levenson, an associate professor of social work at BarryUniversity
who researches sex offender policy and treatment. “Is it perfect? No. Treatment
doesn’t work equally for everyone. People die after getting chemo, but we don’t
say it doesn’t treat cancer.”

Indeed,
the civil commitment system doesn’t always work as it’s supposed to. A
recent investigationby
the Sun Sentinel found that over a 14-year period, Florida considered committing but then
released 594 sex offenders who were later convicted of other sex crimes. These
men went on to molest over 460 children, rape 121 women and kill 14, the Sun
Sentinel reported. The rate of recidivism among child sexual abusers is 13
percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and
research shows that sex offenders with stable jobs, housing and social supports
are far less likely to reoffend. Yet Florida
does not offer supervision programs to offenders after they are released from
the FCCC.

“They’re
just let out, which I think is counterintuitive and counterproductive,” says
Kanner. “You’re setting them up for failure.”

Civil
commitment is also expensive—the FCCC cost $62 million to build and now needs
about $24 million a year to operate. In 2010, the 20 states with civil
commitment programs spent nearly $500 million on 5,200 offenders, according to
an Associated Press analysis.
Another concern is that civil commitment violates offenders’ rights. In Minnesota, a federal
judge recently ruled that the state’s sex offender treatment program, which
holds more than 700 people, is unconstitutional. Since the program launched in
the 1990s, no one has been fully discharged.

David
Lisak, board president of 1in6,
a nonprofit for male victims of child sexual abuse, is a leading psychologist
who studies child sexual abuse and non-stranger rape. “What frightens me,” he
says, “is when I see people winking at each other so we can all pretend this
really does pass constitutional muster, because—wink, wink—we’re treating these
people for a mental illness, when the same people will tell you in the next
breath, especially off the record, that they view these people as untreatable.”

A man
starts walking toward Book, VanSusteren and me. We don’t know much about him
other than he’s 51 years old and his public record includes two offenses, one
for kidnapping and the other for lewdly fondling, assaulting, or committing or
simulating sexual acts on or in the presence of a minor. Since he asked to
remain anonymous, I’ll call him Jesse. His shiny bald head, thin mouth and short-sleeved
collared shirt make him look more like a wimpy uncle than one of the state’s
most dangerous predators. Book stands up, extends her hand and says, “Thank you
for taking the time to talk with us.”

“Anything
to give back to the community and advocate for the kids,” he says, shaking her
hand, then mine and then VanSusteren’s.

“My
awareness,” he says, sounding as if he’s regurgitating treatment literature.
“Realizing the pain I’ve caused in my victims’ lives and in their families and
communities. Everyone is affected. I didn’t want to come here, but I knew I
needed help.” He explains that he was raped at 13, sexually abused by his
brothers and beaten by his father for over a decade.

Later, he
drank. “Offenders don’t go out and rape someone because a lady in the bar won’t
have sex with them. Realize [that] there’s always something going on in that
person’s life that they never addressed.”

When he
talks about his father’s abuse, his mouth starts quivering. “Feeling that
inadequate, I didn’t know how to ask for help. My dad always taught me to
resolve things through anger, and I became a master at that. I’d go to any
length to get what I needed.” It dawns on me that Jesse was exactly the kind of
child Book now works so hard to reach.

He looks
at us with hazel eyes that seem to be getting bigger, sadder and wetter with
each second, and as I scribble down his words, I remember something Kanner told
me a few days earlier: “Listen to what they say with a grain of salt. Most
psychopaths are very charming. You want to like them.”

‘That’s What I Did Wrong’

Growing up, Lauren Book was the eldest and
self-professed “goody two-shoes” of the three children. Her father was often
traveling or working long hours, and her mother was busy running a chocolate
shop. As she writes in her memoir, It’s OK to
Tell: A Story of Hope and Recovery,
she often dreamt about breaking her leg “so I could be the center of attention
for a day.”

Then her parents hired Waldina Flores through
a reputable nanny agency. At first, Flores doted on Book, giving her extra
dessert, letting her stay up late and telling her how pretty she was. This is
called grooming: A predator identifies his or her prey—typically a lonely, shy
child whose parents aren’t paying attention—and showers him or her with special
attention. Book latched on to Flores as a
surrogate parent. “Love and consistency and stability, that’s all I wanted in
my entire life,” Book says.

One day, Flores
told her to stop chewing gum. “I said in my 11-year-old sassiness, ‘What are
you gonna do about it?’” Book recalls. “She proceeded to stick her tongue in my
mouth and take the gum with her tongue.” The abuse escalated from there.

Over the next six years, Flores
performed oral sex on Book and forced Book to do the same on her. She
penetrated her young victim with vegetables and forks, threw her down a flight
of stairs and urinated and defecated on her. Flores
was so controlling, she chose Book’s clothes, did her hair and picked which
feminine hygiene products she could use. “She wanted me to use pads because she
wanted to be the only thing inside me,” Book says. Flores
also convinced her that they were going to get married and have children one day.
The sexual, physical and emotional abuse occurred daily, in bedrooms, bathrooms
and closets, often with Book’s parents and siblings in the next room.

“Waldina
didn’t hurt me 24 hours a day. If it was an hour a day and 23 hours being
wonderful, it doesn’t make the one hour less bad, but that’s what I had to pay
for being loved and having consistency,” Book says. “To be honest, the
trade-off was OK.”

Book was
17 when she told her boyfriend about the abuse, then her therapist and finally
her father. “My dad is not a crying person,” she says. “He was hunched over and
said, ‘I’m sorry, Pip. I’m so sorry.’ I knew that it was gonna be OK. It would
be over, and I didn’t have to do it anymore. Those were three of the best words
in my life: I’m sorry, Pip.”

Book was
lucky; many parents side with the abuser, especially if it’s a spouse or family
member, or they are immobilized by guilt for bringing a predator into their
family. Ron Book immediately filed a police report and forced Flores out of
their home. She was arrested three months later in Oklahoma City, where she’d
gotten a volunteer job coaching a girls’ soccer team. In January 2002, the
Books offered Flores a plea deal of 10 years in prison. Her response (through
her attorney): “Please tell Mr. Book to go fuck himself.”

Ten
months later, just one day before Book’s 18th birthday—the same day the trial
was set to begin—Flores decided she wanted to take the original 10-year offer.
“On behalf of Mr. Book, no deal and please tell Ms. Flores to go fuck herself,”
Ron Book said through his lawyer. Flores ended up accepting a 15-year sentence
for child molestation charges and had to apologize in open court. In 2004, she
received an additional 10 years when she wrote Book love letters from prison,
violating an order not to contact her.

Even
after Flores was arrested, Book’s suffering continued—anorexia,
self-mutilation, depression, sleepless nights, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her recovery stretched out over years, and she still experiences night terrors.
Even her upcoming wedding this summer carries an extra heavy weight: She may
never be able to carry a baby to term due to the scarring from Flores’s abuse.

Despite
all this, Book considers herself one of the lucky ones. “I have tremendous
support from my family, and without them I couldn’t do this. I wouldn’t have
lived,” she says. “Those really tough years made me the person I am today—not
just living through them but living beyond them.”

This year
marks Book’s sixth annual Walk
in My Shoes, a 1,500-mile, monthlong journey that takes her
and tens of thousands of survivors and supporters from Key West to Tallahassee.
Her robust education curricula, Safer, Smarter Kids, is in over 16,000
kindergarten and pre-K classrooms across Florida and select schools in New
York, California, Georgia and Illinois, and across the Caribbean through a
partnership with UNICEF. Experts don’t always agree on the success of such
educational programs, yet testing shows that Book’s has improved kids’ safety
knowledge by 77 percent.

Ron Book,
who still cries when he talks about everything his daughter endured, has spent
more than a decade transforming Florida’s sex offender laws, making it one of
the harshest states for sex offenders. Along with his daughter, he has been an
advocate for nearly two dozen legislative victories. As Levenson puts it, “If
Lauren Book had been shot by somebody, we would have very different gun laws in
Florida. If she was hit by a drunk driver, we would have very different drunk
driving laws.”

“Not too
long ago, the penalty in Florida for failure to report animal abuse carried a
stiffer penalty than failing to report child abuse,” Ron Book says. Legislation
he lobbied for made it mandatory for all Floridians—not just parents or
guardians—to report known or suspected child abuse. Those who fail to do so are
charged with a third-degree felony, and colleges and universities face up to a
$1 million fine for not reporting. He also advocated for laws that make it a
crime for convicted felony offenders to contact victims or their families (the
Lauren Book Protection Act) and imposed mandatory 50-year sentences on those
who knowingly sexually assault individuals with disabilities. When his
local-residency restrictions prohibited registered sex offenders from living,
on average, 2,500 feet from schools, day care centers and other places where
children gather, a colony of homeless offenders popped up under Miami’s Julia
Tuttle Causeway.

For all
Ron Book has done to protect Florida’s children, he carries an immeasurable
grief from what happened to his family. He has never been able to read more
than a few pages of the official police report, but he’s pored over thousands
of photos and 100 hours of video, looking for a clue he might have missed. “I
probably have stayed in a state of denial about guilt. Why else would I be
crying?” he says through tears. “I’ll tell you about what I did wrong: I told
my children, all three of them, ‘The nanny is in control. Do what the nanny
says. Follow her lead! Obey! Respect! Listen to her!’ My middle daughter and
son would say, ‘She’s mean to us.’ And I attributed it to them simply wanting
to be children. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear them. That’s what I did
wrong.”

‘The Land That Time Forgot’

“Girls
and boys, why do we have rules?”

Lauren
Book is standing in front of 30 kindergarteners in a colorful classroom at
Glades Academy, a charter school in Pahokee, Florida. She’s wearing black
sweatpants, running shoes and a teal Lauren’s Kids T-shirt with the
organization’s signature butterfly on the front, and her blond hair is pulled
back in a tight ponytail. “Because rules help us stay...” She pauses. “What?”

“Safe!”
the children shout back. They sit in pairs and wear matching khaki pants and
collared shirts—one of a few sets of uniforms the school gives each child at
the start of the school year.

“Yes,
rules help us stay safe. I’m here today to talk about some of my favorite rules
to help all of you stay safe, OK?”

In
unison: “OK!”

Book is
almost monomaniacally focused on keeping children safe. In her sweet,
high-pitched voice, she asks the kindergarteners to close their eyes and
imagine what a stranger looks like. “Is your stranger tall or is your stranger
short?”

“Tall!”

“Is your
stranger a man or a woman?”

“Man!”

Book asks
about his eyes (“Angry!”), nose (“Pointy!”), mouth (“Mean!”) and clothes
(“Messy!”). Then she asks what he’s holding.

“Guns!”
shouts one boy. “A knife!” says another. “An ax! A shotgun!”

“Now let
me ask you a question, boys and girls,” Book says. “Am I a stranger?”

“Nooooooo!”

“No? When
did you meet me?”

“Today!”

“How many
minutes ago? Like, five minutes ago! Why do you think that I’m not a stranger?”

“’Cause
you’re nice and pretty!” says one girl.

“No
pointy nose! No knife!”

“Boys and
girls, let me tell you something. I am a stranger! Just because I have neat
hair, that doesn’t mean I’m not a stranger. A stranger is just someone you
don’t know well. Can you tell if someone is good or bad from how they look on
the outside?”

For the
first time all morning, the room goes silent.

Book
hasn’t come to preach about stranger danger; she talks about trusted adults and
what children can do if someone makes them feel “icky, confused, scared or not
quite right.” These are important, although rare, lessons here at Glades
Academy.

Surrounded
by thousands of acres of sugarcane, Pahokee is a place where churches abound
and poverty reigns. In 2009, the Palm Beach County Economic Development Office
announced that Pahokee had reached
“Depression levels,” with 32 percent unemployment—nearly three times the
countywide rate. All that for a city that’s just an hour west of glitzy Palm
Beach.

“This is
the drug and sexual abuse capital of the world out here,” says Don Zumpano,
principal of Glades Academy. “These children, the great majority of them don’t
have fathers in the house. The mothers or the grandmothers raise them as best
they can. As far as parent participation, it’s just hurting. I don’t know
exactly how to explain it.... It’s the land that time forgot.”

Dr. Z, as
the students call Zumpano, has worked as a special educator for over 40 years,
the last 10 at Glades Academy. “What we do here is not all about reading,
writing and arithmetic,” he says in the privacy of the teacher’s lounge. “It’s
a lot of socialization. Feeding the kids. Buying them clothes.”

He lets
out a full-bellied sigh when I ask if abuse is a problem among his students,
then tells the story of a boy who came to school with a large burn on his
stomach. It looked to be the size of a curling iron. Zumpano struggled to contact
the boy’s mother—many parents in the community work multiple jobs, or have
disconnected phone lines, or don’t have transportation to get to the school.
When he finally reached her, she said she had no idea why her son had a burn on
his skin. “We did the best we could,” he says.

Like
Book, Zumpano’s childhood inspires his work. “My mother raised four boys by
herself. So I know what...” he pauses. “I was once one of these kids,” he says,
eyes filling with tears. He stares at the ground, then quickly stands up,
apologizes and walks out.

Down the
hallway, Book and the Lauren’s Kids team help the kindergarteners come up with
three trusted adults (what Book calls their “Trusted Triangle”). “How do I
spell Grandma?” one asks. “How many M’s in Mom?” asks another. In the back row,
a girl with braids is zoning out. VanSusteren kneels down and asks her whom she
wants to put in her Trusted Triangle. The girl rests her head on her desk. “Who
are the adults in your life who make you feel safe?” VanSusteren asks.

The girl
covers her head. “Your mommy or daddy?” The girl shakes her head no.

After
class, VanSusteren mentions the exchange to the teacher, who explains that the
girl had just been removed from her parents’ home and now lives with her aunt.
It’s not the first time one of Book’s school visits has led to such a
discovery.

“I’m glad
to know the teacher is in the loop, because sometimes when we’ve done
activities like that, unsafe situations have been disclosed that were not
previously known,” says VanSusteren. “So many times, children want to tell you
something isn’t quite right, but they don’t have the words to do so.”

Just 10 Percent of the Problem

The myth
of stranger danger—“dirty men” lurking in parks or malls, luring our children
away from us with puppies and candy—is itself a danger. The reality is, the
overwhelming majority of predators are in the victim’s family photo album or
social circle. Ninety percent of children who are sexually abused know their
abuser. A 2000 study found that family members
account for 34 percent of people who abuse juveniles, and acquaintances account
for another 59 percent. Only 7 percent were strangers.

Yet
conversations about child sexual abuse often focus on horrific examples of
stranger danger. We find comfort in searching registries to find out whether
registered sex offenders live in our neighborhoods. We tell our children not to
talk to strangers. And we label men and women who abuse children as monsters.
This demonizing of strangers is extremely dangerous, considering that 1 in 3
girls and 1 in 5 boys are sexually abused by the time they turn 18, and around 90 percent of
individuals with developmental disabilities will be sexually abused at some
point.

“We have
an idea that I would know [a sex offender] if I saw one, and I can avoid it and
keep my child away,” says Karen Baker, director of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
“We need to get over the idea that we can tell who’s a good and bad person.”

The
Catholic Church sex abuse cover-up and the Jerry Sandusky case, in which the
former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University was convicted
of sexually assaulting 10 boys, prove just how wrong that notion is. So do two
more recent revelations: Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert allegedly
paid a former student millions of dollars to cover up allegations of sexual
abuse, and Josh Duggar, the eldest son on 19 Kids and Counting, TLC’s popular
Christian family values reality show, molested five girls when he was a
teenager, including four of his sisters.

“It’s a
hard idea to keep in the forefront of your thinking,” says David Finkelhor, who
directs the Crimes Against Children Research Centerat
the University of New Hampshire and has been researching child victimization
and family violence for nearly 40 years. “You can’t be interacting with your
neighbors and then thinking all the time about whether they’re molesting your
kids.”

The good
news is that, for more than two decades, the rate of child sexual abuse has
been declining in the U.S. Between 1992 and 2013, the number of cases fell 64
percent, according to a studyheaded by
Finkelhor. Costly criminal justice initiatives—like sex offender registries,
community notification and civil commitment—are often credited for this
dramatic change, but Finkelhor argues that “these came online after the decline
had already started.”

Still,
those big-ticket criminal justice efforts tend to get all the money and attract
all the headlines. Yet these initiatives, Finkelhor says, “mostly pertain to
people already identified and arrested—and only about 10 percent of new cases
of abuse involve someone who has a prior record. Even if you lock up everybody
who had been convicted of an offense, you’d only be taking care of 10 percent
of the problem.... We need more prevention and treatment in this area, but that
costs money and legislators don’t want to do that.”

Sex
offender registries, for example, demand huge fiscal and human resources, yet
“the abundance of research appears to say they aren’t really successful,” says
Levenson, who has met more than 2,000 sex offenders in her 25 years as a
licensed clinical social worker. “However, they are successful in making people
feel safer.” By comparison, sex offender management and prevention programs
receive far less funding.

“Wouldn’t
it be better to stop child sexual abuse before it starts? Everyone says yes,
and then I hear we don’t have the money for that,” says Elizabeth Letourneau,
director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We have money to spend
millions of dollars on [prosecuting and punishing] sex offenders, but no money
to prevent these things from occurring in the first place.”

‘I Am Fearless’

By 10
a.m., the hot Florida sun is beating down on all of us—Book, the Lauren’s Kids
team, the pack of walkers. It’s the 22nd day of Walk in My Shoes, and we’ve all
but stopped traffic on a local road in Bradenton, Florida. Behind us rolls
Book’s souped-up bus, a confection of pink, teal and white with a gigantic
photo of Book emblazoned across the side and the phrase “Walk in My Shoes: Come
Walk With Us.” Miley Cyrus’s pump-up anthem “Party in the U.S.A.” blasts from
its speakers.

Some
days, the walk attracts hundreds of people. Today there’s about two dozen, and
Book cycles through the small crowd like the Energizer Bunny, introducing
herself to newcomers and hugging walkers who have become part of the extended
Lauren’s Kids family. Everyone is wearing a teal Lauren’s Kids T-shirt, each
with an empty white box on the back for the person to write his or her reason
for walking. “For my wife :),” says one. “I’m a survivor,” says another. Book’s
T-shirt reads, “For all of our kids.”

A tall,
beefy young man with a black bandana over his head wrote one word on his
T-shirt: “Kriss,” with a heart over the “i.” That’s his girlfriend, and they’re
walking hand in hand. “I was molested as a child, and I was also raped twice,
so I walk for that,” says Kriss, 26, who has short blond hair with streaks of
pink. “In my family, they don’t understand so they blame me. It’s OK to open
up. It’s gonna suck, but that’s the first step: admitting what happened. It
took me almost 10 years.”

This is a
familiar refrain today. Ken Followell, 57, was sexually molested by various
family members starting when he was 2. The abuse continued until he was 14, and
he didn’t speak up about it until his late 30s. Followell was raised in a large
extended family in Gary, Indiana. “They kept all the female cousins away from
[one male family member] because they knew he had abused” girls before. “They
never thought boys would be at risk, but he was flexible,” says Followell, who
is a board member and former president of MaleSurvivor.
“Because he was a pedophile, he wasn’t interested in gender. He was interested
in children.”

I’m
walking with a young woman named Patty when we hear the indie rock hit
“Pompeii,” by Bastille, with its recurring chorus, “How am I gonna be an
optimist about this?” She explains that she was sexually abused by her father
but repressed the memories until her younger sister, then 4, told her she was
being molested by their mother’s boyfriend.

“I had
flashbacks to what I had to endure—my mother not believing me and me having to
deal with it for 10 years. It was at that point that I said, ‘I’m not going to
let this child go through what I went through,’” Patty says, breathing heavily.
“By the grace of God, I had the strength to call [Child Protective Services] on
her and take my three sisters.” Patty still has custody of one of them, but the
other two live with their mother. “Maybe I couldn’t help all of my sisters, but
one is OK.”

Every
person I meet during the walk has a similar story of tragedy and resilience. There’s
Chuck and his son, Chris, who has Williams syndrome, a genetic disability. They
came up from Sarasota to walk because, three years ago, Chris disclosed that he
had been sexually abused by a relative. There’s also JR, a 41-year-old woman
with an intellectual and developmental disability. As a child, she was adopted
by a family that treated her as a sex slave, forcing her to endure sadistic
sexual, physical and emotional abuse. When Book first met her a few years ago,
JR weighed 90 pounds and refused to speak to anyone other than Ninja and Ozzie,
her stuffed animal penguins. Today, thanks to trauma therapy and Book’s
friendship, she’s gained about 20 pounds and talked to me while we walked. She
was one of less than a dozen people who crossed the finish line that day, and
she did so holding Book’s hand and saying, “I am strong! I am brave! I am
fearless!”

In the
evening, after walking nearly 25 miles, hosting a children’s event at a
bookstore and talking with families at a cookout in a strip mall, Book collapses
in her bus. She wraps a pink blanket around her shoulders and places enormous
bags of ice on her shins. After calling her fiancé and doing a quick FaceTime
with her father, Book says to me, “Do you know how many people came to my first
wedding? Eight hundred! This time, we only ordered 125 invitations.” After
gushing about the guy, the dress and the locale—and explaining that, in her
early 20s, she was briefly married to her high school sweetheart—she tells me
about two of her favorite things: “Spoelstra and Birdman,” she says.

“Birdman,
the movie?” I ask, because at the time I had no idea what a Spoelstra was.
(Erik Spoelstra, the coach of the Miami Heat, apparently.)

She looks
at me as if I had suddenly sprouted three heads. Her Birdman, I learn, is not
the 2015 Academy Award winner for best picture but rather a heavily tattooed,
mohawk-sporting basketball player on the Miami Heat named Chris Andersen. She
explains all this, then bursts out laughing. It’s the first time in three days
she hasn’t been on. (Ironically, in 2013 Andersen was ensnared in an elaborate Internet hoax
involving underage girls and child pornography. He was cleared of all
involvement.)

“The
walks are so hard,” says Book, who has trekked across Florida on scorching hot
days and through downpours, all with severe shin splints and other injuries.
“I’m in pain, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s what matters: Being there
in that moment to help set JR on a better path.... There is a greater purpose
for us, with what we’re doing. It’s JR. It’s Ken [Followell]. It’s Chris and
Chuck. Just because these terrible things happen, it doesn’t mean we’re not
still incredibly strong, powerful people. We’re not damaged goods.”

‘Your Triggers, Your Fantasies’

“I have
five victims—two minors and three adult females. I’d walk up from behind, grab
their breasts and then flee the scene.” That’s what Jesse says when Book asks
him about his crimes. Later, we can’t help but wonder whether he committed any
others, because, as Book says, “you don’t end up in civil commitment just for
groping a few women and children.”

Jesse,
who is in treatment and close to being considered for release, believes in the
civil commitment process. The FCCC’s four-phase treatment program aims to help
predators learn control. That means increasing their empathy for other people,
helping them understand the factors that led them down a path of abuse, and
teaching them to recognize their triggers, like drinking or feeling lonely.

“It’s
changed my life and changed my future,” Jesse says. And he has a lot to work
for: a 31-year-old daughter in Pennsylvania and a grandson, who’s 5. He talks
to them every day, he says, and dreams of getting better, getting out and
living with them. “Success is having a support group, and they have to be fully
aware of your past,” he says. “They need to know your triggers, fantasies,
dislikes.”

Book is
sitting perfectly still, listening to Jesse talk about what his life will be
like on the other side. I can already tell she’s concerned about his
grandson—and the fact that he’s putting the onus on his family to keep watch on
his weaknesses, not himself. She asks him how he’ll keep his grandson safe if
he moves in with them. “I wouldn’t trust anybody,” he says. “You really need to
know the people your kids are with.”

The next
resident we meet—I’ll call him Michael—looks like a guy you’d find at a
Brooklyn coffee shop wearing Warby Parkers and sporting a 5 o’clock shadow too
manicured to be the result of laziness. As Book put it later, “If you met him
at a Starbucks, you would have been like, ‘Hmm, he’s kinda cute.’” But Michael,
41, says he’s spent just nine months outside of prison since 1998; it all
started when he was 25 and served two years in California for what he calls
“the first felony offense I was ever caught for.” His victims ranged in age
from 8 to 50.

“I’m a
public masturbator,” he says. “As I escalated, I graduated to touch victims and
masturbating when they were sleeping and unaware.” The bolder he got, the less
fulfilling these acts became. “I attempted to rape a woman in California. In
Florida, I manipulated my neighbor’s teenage daughters into watching me
masturbate through a window.”

“How did you
do that?” Book says.

“I was
smooth, charming and cool. I played on their desires to be liked, played on the
fact that they liked attention from a 24-year-old guy.” One day, Michael heard
someone singing a lewd song next door. “Instead of being an adult and ignoring
it, I said, ‘Aha!’ I knew then I’d try to exploit the situation. I’d talk to
[my neighbors’ daughters] at night through the windows.... I started getting
out of the shower and dressing in my room so they could watch me.”

“Do you
remember the song?”

“Something
about balls,” he says. “I honestly don’t remember.”

This is
Michael’s 10th year at the FCCC. He’s been in treatment for eight, and like
Jesse, he links his crimes to his childhood. “I didn’t grow up in an abusive
home, but my mom had a shallow emotional vocabulary,” he says. “As I grew up, I
didn’t grow up.... I had secret sexual thoughts and horrible ideas. I thought
what was otherwise normal behavior, like masturbating, was bad for me.” At the
word masturbating, he looks us straight in the eyes. “That was my 12-year-old
heroin.”

Michael
wants to go to trucking school, but says leaving the FCCC “will be like a blind
person seeing for the first time. This is like practice here, but only at half
speed. I’ll have to get up to full speed, and that’s my fear. We’re not
monsters. We were monsters.”

Our final
interview of the day is with Donald (a pseudonym), who has been described as
one of the five most manipulative men here. He’s the one who sends Book and her
father letters complaining about Lauren’s Kids, civil commitment and the FCCC.
He walks into the room wearing a checked shirt, a red tie and thick black
glasses, looking like a used car salesman who woke up one day and decided to
run for mayor. His gray hair is combed back, and before he sits down, he
confidently reaches his clammy hand across the table and shakes Book’s hand,
then mine and says, “I want to take the time to thank you for wanting to
interview me.”

Everybody—defense
attorney Cohen; Mason, the FCCC lawyer; and the security guard—has intense,
visceral reactions to Donald. The guard gets up from his seat near the wall and
sits next to Book and Mason. Another guard comes in, says we have five or 10
minutes, max, and then stands on the other side of the room for the duration of
the interview. Even Jesse, when he learned we were meeting with Donald,
chuckled and covered his eyes with one arm.

When Book
asks Donald why he’s at the FCCC, he says he was convicted of four counts of
sexual battery, committed against his girlfriend. “I was 39 and she was 46. She
discovered I had an affair. We had a 50 Shades of Grey type of relationship. I
must say, the movie is disappointing.” He looks at Book when he adds, “Have you
seen it?”

She
shakes her head no. (“Of course I’ve seen 50 Shades, and read it, but I wasn’t
going to give him that satisfaction,” she tells me later.)

Donald
continues, “We had a kinky relationship. She retaliated because of the affair,
and I ended up being convicted of sexual battery.”

Donald,
who’s 58, has not yet been civilly committed, but if he is, he plans to refuse
treatment. “It takes six to eight years. I’ll be 65!” he says. “They call this
a state-of-the-art treatment center. It’s a state-of-the-art prison under the
guise of treatment. I’m gonna put my feet up and retire. A gated community in
Florida is one hell of a way to retire!”

Before
Book and I have a chance to ask many more questions, the guards signal that the
interview is over. Donald looks at Book and smiles. “Tell your dad I say ‘hi!’”
To VanSusteren and me: “Ladies, thank you.” Then he raises one hand up in the
air and gives us a single, solid wave.

Back in
the bus, Book sits cross-legged beneath her pink blanket and picks red and
white gummy bears out of a bag. “When you start the day in Pahokee with these
kids who are so underprivileged and at a greater risk for a lot of things...
They had never seen you and didn’t know your name, but they run up and hug
you,” she says. “Then you go to the center and talk with those guys and you’re
looking into evil.... You unleash that [in Pahokee]? That’s a recipe for
horrific, horrible outcomes....

“Seeing
these men in plainclothes sitting across from me reminds me that they are
people. But they’re lions in sheep’s clothing.”

Disclaimer:

This blog is for informational purposes only; I strive to provide accurate and current information.

I do not claim to be a legal resource and suggest you always consult with a licensed Attorney and the Virginia State Police’s Sex Offender Hotline (804) 674-2825 where needed.

I advocate for data-driven, proven reform as opposed to the current knee-jerk, myth-driven, one-size-fits-all method in Virginia. I do not support abolishment of the registry and that is why I do not link to other groups or sites with an abolishment goal or ones with radical tactics.

This blog is not affiliated with any other group and does not solicit donations because it is not an incorporated non-profit.